Collider Phenomenology (Oxford, BUSSTEP 2018)

An introduction to collider physics, through a quick tour on perturbative QCD (with the minimum required to understand LHC events) and with examples on jets, W-boson, Higgs-boson and top-quark phenomenology.

Lectures are given at the blackboard with some material presented through slides. Reference slides containing a much wider selection of topics with respect to those actually presented can be found here:

1. Basics Slides
2. A QCD tool box Slides
3. The SM of EW interactions Slides
4. The Higgs boson Slides
5. The Top quark Slides
6. Searching New Physics through the Higgs and the top quark Slides

Supporting material

The course includes tests, simple exercises, fully worked out numerical calculations/simulations, and a complete and easy-to-use series of mathematica notebooks which allow the computation at next-to-leading order accuracy of the total production cross section of a Higgs boson in gluon-gluon fusion at the LHC

Tests and exercises

Exercises

Pheno applications

1. DIS quarks : fermions vs scalars (Mathematica Notebook) DIS_quark_fermionVSscalar.nb​
2. W spin correlations (Mathematica Notebook) wspincorr.nb​
3. Exercises (Mathematica Notebook) exercises.nb​

Higgs production at the LHC : A case study

1. pp>H at LO (1-loop): details of the calculation (Mathematica Notebook) HiggsGG-LO-mtfinite.nb​
2. pp>H at NLO: details of the calculation (Mathematica Notebook) higgsgg-nlo.nb​
3. pp>H at NLO: cross section evaluation for the LHC (Mathematica Notebook+PDF libraries to be compiled) phenHiggs.zip​.

The original paper by Sally Dawson on the NLO calculation can be found here​ and a note of the calculation results can be found in ​here.

Hands On LHC Phenomenology

• SM Higgs discovery at the LHC: Three important channels
• Simple Black Boxes: New gauge bosons

Bibliography

The main references for the lectures are:

• QCD and collider physics, The pink Book, by Ellis, Stirling and Webber, Cambridge Press.
• Michelangelo Mangano write-up of his QCD lectures.

-- Main.FabioMaltoni - 20178-08-27